First Entries – Hydrocodone Chronicles

First entries.

In The beginning was the Word. The cool damp mists, the calm grey seas.  Gentle breeze, undulating reeds.  Eternally waiting for the dawn.

I’m going to start with the first writing to come to the surface. As I gather all my materials together, this one floats to the top. I’m not sure why. But we have to start somewhere.

I cut all ties. I jumped the fence and stuck out my thumb. The road took me to Nashville, the state fair. I hooked up with The Flyin’ Bobs, bucking a ride. Occasionally, I would scratch out a letter, or find a pay phone. It’s evident that I was a little confused.

The Summer of 1975

Well Folks,

It looks as if that note I left on Mom’s desk was a good-bye letter, though I didn’t know it at the time.

I decided to hit the road. I’m in Nashville now, working at the Tennessee state fair. The salary is ninety dollars weekly, and the days average fifteen hours long. The take home averages seventy-five cents an hour.

Well, I told my boss (all the bosses drive big cars) I’ve decided to split. He couldn’t understand it. In typical fashion, he insists on sending me my last week’s pay. He has your address, but I think I’m going to make a stink over it.

One thing for sure, when you’re on the road, pennies count. Any money left unguarded is fair game.

We’re (that’s the crew of the Flyin’ Bobs, and our women), are staying in an empty shipping container owned by the show.

Anyway, we have some money now and will be headed toward Jackson, Mississippi. Then either down to Florida, or west to Arizona.

Tomorrow I have planned to visit a commune called “The Farm”. About sixty-five miles south of Nashville. The commune has been operational for seven years. They cultivate about 1000 acres, scrap metal, have a print shop, have a band that’s cut three albums, and a carpentry business. I may spend a few days there.

Anyway, I’ll be calling to see if the money’s been sent. I have to get back out on the ride.

 

Love,

Mike

Dad scrawled boldly on the bottom of the page, GLORY BE !!  OUR SON HAS JOINED THE CIRCUS.

 

The Hydrocodone Chronicles

In December of 2017, I had an accident. I fell, breaking ribs. A flash of black light.  It was quite serious. I had to use hydrocodone to manage the pain. I became hyper graphic, and started to write prolifically. Events that had been buried in my subconscious memory came to the surface. Memories of time on the road, the hit- run, the hospitals, came to the surface, became flesh. With pencil and paper, I harvested them. This first entry we’ll call the “Hydrocodone Chronicles” and it was written as a letter to my niece Kate, who was stationed overseas, in the foreign service.

January 6^th, 2018

A tear drop,

A fear drop,

A  brand new year drop.

The sweet taste of mystical love.

It’s all I desire,

A mountain,

An alter,

Twelve stones,

A fire,

A dove.

 

First,

A wail of sorrow,

Then, a cry of pain.

A barking dog,

The rushing gales,

The breaking of cold chain.

 

I faced off against the powers of Hell.

My weapons, this prayer and word.

To free the world from Satan’s dark spell,

The truth, yea, the truth, shall be heard.

Eternal oneness with the moment of… His timelessness.

These words tumble out of my heart, as cold water from the spring. This most recent distress beckons me to write again. Yeweh, Jehovah, Jah. He is the shelter whom I seek. My refuge, my God. These words, conceived in peace, and spoken to a better world.

 

I am sitting at my desk, in my office space, at the Lake House. The Lake House is a roomy guest house, near the lake Ontario shore.

Last week I had a crew here, finishing up the installing of my out-buildings. It was a cold, early winter day. All was going OK. We were just about done. The crew was loading up their tools, as darkness was upon us. I walked up the ramp  to check the door on the newly installed cabin, but I slipped and fell backward.  Trying a second time, my feet slipped out from under me.  I hit the wooden decking hard. I heard my ribs crack, all went black for a moment.

I managed to get to my feet. I summoned my workers, and asked them to stay with me while I figured out a way to get to the hospital.

I have a neighbor. David by name. He is a good Samaritan. In fact, I have two brothers named Dave, who show themselves to be brothers.

 

Two days later

I was doing pretty good, and took myself off the hydrocodone. But last night in the middle of the night, I had a hard sneeze. Bones crunched, I screamed. By dawn today, I was in near spasms. It’s 6:30 pm. now, I’ve been resting all day. I’ve been keeping the devil at bay with aspirin, Alleve, and Tylenol.

I’m going downstairs to find something to eat. And look at e-mails. I’m OK, as long as I watch how I move.

 

I hit the deck,

and it all went black.

Held in check,

Though my ribs went crack.

 

Sue called today with her ‘’arrived safely”. There were things I didn’t remember to share with her.  I checked the tanks, we got our propane today. I wanted to walk down to Dave’s today, to say “hello”. But the lane is iced over, and I cannot risk another fall.

I had a hallucination the other night. The other patients and workers at the psych center. Our place in eternity. We were as cartoons. Ink wearing thin on fragile, old paper. My artwork is destined for the rooms and halls of the Richardson Olmsted Center. The renovated and repurposed buildings of the psych. center from the 1800’s.

I was typing out an E-mail to Monica, and lost the letter as I completed it. “Control Z” worked.

The hydrocodone. When I stopped breathing, the dogs would start barking. I would get to the end of an exhalation, and couldn’t get the next breath started. It happened six times in the middle of the night. And Sue, forcing me to stay conscious and breathe. Hydrocodone should be prescribed with a buddy system. It’s too easy to accidentally overdose.

I’m much better now. As long as I catch my coughs and sneezes.

1-10-18

Anxiety, for me, has the effect, when it’s severe, of reflecting my thoughts and fears back at me.

Through the TV., radio, from the human conversations around me, I hear my thoughts reflected back at me. Premonitions can be mixed in ,as well.

Can you imagine trying to eat a meal in a restaurant when every personal and private thought is handed to you on a plate for dinner?

                              Katie responded; “This is very provocative and interesting. Anxiety producing for sure”.

 

 

I repented hard.

God is thirsting for our worship.

Katie, God is thirsting for your worship.

 

I experience things in the Spirit realm, that a Fundamentalist would call delusion, or the work of demons.

Before we closed Mom’s casket, I anointed her forehead with perfume, as she asked in a dream, years before she died.

As per, I sprayed Jasmine perfume on her third eye area. It ran down into her closed eyes, and formed a droplet that looked like a tear.

Last week, with the rib fracture, hydrocodone, and the not breathing crises, I found myself under a dark gray cloud. Mom and Dad, now both deceased, were both very, very, near.

           Katie responded to this: “ I love this. I think all of us experienced unique and mystical things while watching the process of death with grandpa, and Grandma”.

As my body started to mend, it took on a new smell. For a week now, I’ve smelled like the Jasmine perfume I want you to have when I’m done. Deceased. Along with all the crystals, and contents of my prayer table. It will help you with your practice.

         *  Katie responded, “I’ve noticed this too after getting sick, but not in the positive way you explain”.

As I lay in bed, at night, injured, breathing became treacherously difficult. When I got to the end of an exhalation, beginning the next inhalation became almost impossible. Both dogs, Andy and Lulu, decided to stay with me that night. Each time the breathing stopped, the dogs started barking. Somehow that helped me begin the next breath. The next day, when the breathing seemed to become unnecessary, Sister Sue was there to force me to inhale.

Only now, after forty-three years of affliction, do I begin to understand something about my illness and it’s circumstances. My mind, at times, has been like a radio receiving five different stations at one time. Sometimes comforting, sometimes chaos. The clozaril has been like a filter. It’s allowed me to tune out a lot of negative stuff, and actually choose the entities that nourish and guide. But staying tuned in is constant work. In fact, at this point in life, staying tuned in is the core meaning and challenge of my life.

Many years ago, 1986, when I was inpatient on e-ward at Saint Lawrence, I met an ally from the spirit world. Her name was spelled Aine. I’ve called her Anne. A guardian of intelligence workers. Protection and power. This was the beginning of my C.I.A. period, which I’ve never been able to get completely out of. Service and psychosis.                                                                                                                                                                                               AN ANCIENT WARRIOR SPIRIT, ALIGNED WITH THE CELESTIALS

Grant cover, when cover is needed.

Sanctify the things I consume.

Forgive the sins I commit while under cover.

 

The confusing mess of spirits in the asylums is called a poltergeist. “Haunted” is a simpler word.

Remember, psychiatric meds are mind altering chemicals. The meds, and the spirits together create a confusion that can be nearly impossible to untangle. Of course, all of this is unscriptural. However, my beliefs are based on experience, and not on the lack of experience.

Sandra and Bob called today. We had a sweet chat. She shared how she has found herself often in communion with our Mom. In her thoughts. I shared that I’ve learned to pray too.

         * Here Kate interjects; This is such an honest account of your experiences. It’s really powerful and I think the internal and external worlds you experience managing schizophrenia, and the 3- dimensionality you give them  would be great for a larger work and probably helpful for others walking the same or similar paths.

That my prayers began on hallucinogens in 1974. A terrible L.S.D. overdose that forever changed my life. I went beyond a near death experience. I perished in the eternal punishments of hell. I prayed the Our Father as I found myself in the shower, coming back to this reality.

And then doing mescaline with Native American brothers as we worked the carnivals

On mescaline, which was probably a dirty version of L.S.D., The “Great Spirit” showed me to focus on a star, at night, and to slowly and deeply breathe. The Great Spirit said “you’re a white man, use a street light if you need to”. I got deeply into this ancient form of meditation. But I found I got stuck there. I would get into meditation, and I couldn’t get out. I began fasting at this time of my life too. This is how I ended up in the mental hospital. At least part of the reason, anyhow.

Add getting shoved around by the bullies in school, starving for months at a time to make weight on the wrestling team, getting involved with a pedophile at fifteen years old, the hit run car accident, the mental wards and those terrible medicines.

It is a true miracle a that I can sit here, and write “I love you”.

It is my first hope that we all, in this family, find one another again in Heaven, the next world. In Catholicism, true Catholicism, mystical Catholicism, is every answer you could ever search for. We have a tradition with roots deep in the millennia. And Katie, we have the sacraments, confession, communion, which so simplify things.

Would you sacrifice your salvation to open the door for others? Our Lord spent three days in Hell. Of which each moment was eternal suffering.

I’m thinking that we have ascendeds in this world that have volunteered in Heaven for a tour of duty down here, in the Earth realm. To help mankind and his home, on earth. But even an ascended can loose his or her eternal ranking through pride and disobedience.

Boy oh boy, Katie, it’s only January thirteenth, and it’s already been a brutal winter. You were saying that somehow this phenomenal cold relates to global warming. You’ll have to explain that to me.

*To this Katie commented: “Higher global temperatures mean the atmosphere can hold more water vapor. This makes bigger storms with more precipitation. Global warming is also changing the jet stream that kept the arctic, polar air, far north. It is loosing strength, so it dips further south. It used to be rare, but now it’s more common. Those two things bring colder winter, and more precipitation with storms.

Have you seen Bob’s artwork? It got me thinking about how our music, our art, our writing, can take on the attributes of a living entity. And in so, be a vehicle of healing, guidance, and restoration. This is the true call every artist.

It’s been sixteen days now since the accident. And I’m mending quickly. One owns that to his or her circle of friends and family.

Katie, when you’re in meditation or prayer, and it becomes difficult, stay in form. This is when your light merges with timelessness and change. *To which Kate responds, “it’s hard”.

Take a little time, and through worship build a shelter under which to live. A few weeks, a few months.  Use your developing powers daily. Solve your problems while in the worship realm. Then walk out your solution, your victory. Don’t even consider facing challenges without a daily devotion.

I can share prayer forms with you.

 

And several times the path of mortification led to catatonic collapse. With my weight down to about  seventy pounds, the trauma of this state left me unable to move, eat or drink. I was paralyzed. I remember my Dad touching my cheek as I lay in stillness on the family room couch. My face had been injured.

He lay his loving hand on my face. In love, he drew out the injury. He put honey and warm water on my lips. But I was too far gone, too close to death. He picked me up in his arms. I was limp, and unresponsive. He and Mom drove me to the hospital. To remember this brings me to the point of tears. He did love me.

I remember being laid down on a bed. I remember nurses coming into my room, and injecting me with haloperidol every few hours. A few days later, I came around , with a voracious hunger. They fattened me up quickly with Ensure, peanut butter and jelly, in addition to all the regular meals.

But haloperidol has it’s drawbacks. It causes a distonic reaction, a severe, seizure like event. You will experience your mental and spiritual powers exiting as distonia passes through you. And then there is tardive diskenesia, where your muscles will clench and contract involuntarily. The attendant discomforts, edginess, cause you to desire to part from your body.

The phenothiazines put chains on the mind, and also cause depression. One wants to resort back to marijuana, which with psychosis can be tragic. The psychic state is both overwhelming and dangerous.

I overdosed, accidentally, in 1974. I was nineteen years old. I lived in a trailer, back in the woods, and hitched to work each day. The young boys that picked me up started spending time with me at my hermitage. Some of them were drug dealers. My enclave was full of partiers when I left for work in the morning and when I came home at night. I was working in a body shop, for seventy-five dollars a week.

There were times when the little mobile home was packed wall to wall with young people I did not know. The boy that was dealing acid had a pocket full of broken pills. Fragments of tiny, little, purple pills. He gave them to me.

I did them all at once. What a horrendous experience. I am still afraid to talk about it, as to this day I still deal with the spirit entities I encountered.  If I would smoke marijuana today, the Skyforce would be there.

I have learned the enlightenment and power I experience on marijuana is the metabolises  or consumption of one’s aura. You need a strong aura to stay well and function successfully. If your aura is consumed in a drug experience, you may experience the psychic world, but you may leave yourself unprotected.

One can gain enlightenment without drugs. Learn from the masters. The Benedictines of Mount Savior have been my mentors. Trying to find my way from the kitchen to the guesthouse, I got lost back in the cloister. I tried to sneak past the abbot as he sat under his prayer shawl, Bible open before him. Mmmmm, mmmmm, he cleared his throat. “The answers you seek, Michael, will be found in the Bible and prayer.

No matter how deep you need to go, whatever revelation or power you seek, your Catholicism will guide the way. I invite you to meet the monastics that have been my guiding light.

Daily meditation is a simple necessity, and part of hygiene.

Marcia Garlapo, a neighbor on October Lane, spoke of the Trappists at The Abbey of the Genesee. It was a conversation that changed my life. I visited them, deep in psychosis. But I learned from them things I cannot verbalize. Perpetual motion, the Wheel of Ezekiel, eternal creation.

But it was the monks of Mount Savior that ultimately embraced me. At twenty years old, I visited them early on in my illness. Father Martin actually drove me to the psych ward in Elmira.  I’d damaged my vehicle on the road as I drove to the monastery. While I was in the hospital, they fixed the van. I was only in then for four days. The hospital drove me back to the monastery. There, Father Martin gave me a twenty dollar bill, and sent me home to Mom and Dad. It was 1979.

1-18-18

When I was hallucinating with this last injury and medication, the Spirit said, “it’s time to start practicing deep breathing type meditation again. The Spirit meant this as a daily habit, a lifestyle.

The Bible tells us in several places, that angels can take an incarnate form on Earth. Consider that we may have encountered angels. Consider that it is possible that you, I, others may be angels. Beings who may have signed up for another tour of duty, and are here to help mankind, to do God’s will.

Katie writes: I love this imagery.     

Early on in the course of my illness, I fell on my knees, catatonic, in a church. Dana, my brother-in-law was there. He hit me hard, in the face, to rouse me. But he just knocked me over. Dad was called, he came and carried me home. It was then he laid me on the couch, and tried to heal me.

The White Stone is a ritual. It will get you through difficult situations. After the acid overdose, marijuana alone would get me out into psychedelic space. I often felt I needed to go there, but it was dangerous. I created a preparatory rite that would put light all around me, so that the spirits and entities I encountered would be good and fair.

These are the elements I use. I still do the White Stone ritual. But not to prepare for drug use, but as a rite of cleansing:

Two white candles

Incense

A bowl with four ice cubes, or cold water

Eleven bows

Twenty minutes of confession, before God, under a white shawl

Read out loud Matthew 5:3-16

Read out loud a chapter of Revelations

 

All of this under a white shawl. A white robe, or sheet, or blanket will suffice.

Eat a piece of fruit when you are done.

Sometimes there is no priest or anointed guide to be there. This helps you to go on your own.

I find carrying a clear quartz crystal, and a piece of white quartz to be helpful. It’s part of being a healer. A healer is someone who carries positive energy into every situation. Meet every situation with the Gloria Patre. “Glory, Oh Glory Be, to the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. As it was in the beginning, is now, and ever shall be. Amen.

Early  July, 1985

I’d managed to get out of Buffalo, and up to Saranac Lake. But there was a powerful curse upon me. I had almost no money. And verbal communication with others was nearly impossible. Yet, when I sat by the lake, on mountain summer nights, silent lightening would punctuate my thoughts. It was a time when my mind was awakening. With every new insight, with every revelation, lightening, silent lightening, would arc across the sky.

I visited an old friend on Kiwassa Lake, Glenn Pond. My distress was unmistakable. The State Police came, and I was taken to the barracks for questioning. Someone there produced a Bible. I remember reading to them from Daniel, in the Old Testament. A chaplain showed up. I read to them a prophecy of a saint yet to come, named Michael.

The chaplain shared an insight with me. “Miraculous things occur whenever a righteous man is imprisoned”. I was loaded into the back of a police car, the destination was Ogdensburg. It was now the middle of the night. Though it was only two hours away, we drove all night, changing police cars three times.

We arrived at dawn. Above the admissions building a swarm of a thousand seagulls circled. I was asked “who is this that has come to be amongst us?”

Having completed three months on admissions, I thought I was going to be released. But I was transferred to E-ward, long term. E-ward was tough, and dirty. And on the edge of another reality. We had a phonograph with a cassette player. Every time the recordings were played, the words would be different. And always reflecting my thoughts. Know this, agent, reality is not solid. We are in a constant state of flux.

I was given a roommate. A man with a doctorate in English history, and a masters in theology. He was a peculiar man. He taught me the Liturgy of the Hours. I immersed myself in prayer. Meanwhile, I was given a rigorous daily schedule. Rise at 6:00. Meds and breakfast at 7:00. Group at 8:00. Gym at 10:00. Lunch and meds at noon. O.T. from !:00 to 4:00. Meds and dinner at 5:00. Sometimes we could open the gym in the evening. Volleyball was on the docket. Back to the ward  at 8:30. Meds and snack at 9:00. Everyone to their rooms at 10:00.

The O.T. program had just been given a generous grant. We had a fully equipped and furnished studio. In those days, we were all given a pack of cigarettes every morning. Tobacco was used for behavior control.

       Katie writes: This entire episode at Ogdensburg is so compelling.

After several months I escaped e-ward. It was the morning after I met the spirit Anne. I carried nothing but a star-chart and a hymnal. On the back of the star-chart I had printed in black ink, “C.I.A.” A trucker picked me up, and drove me to Watertown. Though the voices wanted me to go to Texas, and find a brothel to live over.

Again, I ended up in the State Police barracks. Back in one of the rooms was a radio set up. The question was sent to intelligence. “We have a man with a star-chart and a hymnal. His name is Michael McLean”. I was identified.

The hospital posse came to get me, taking me back to E-ward. As I passed the nursing station, the phone rang. It was Mom and Dad calling me from Buffalo. We had a short conversation, the desk listening.  When I told them I’d made actual contact with the C.I.A., the staff attacked me. They pounded me into the floor, and wrapped me in a straight- jacket. They injected me with God knows what, and called for a police escort.

I was on my way to high security, the Rock, 007. This is where the story really begins. Actually, I was sent to 007 three times. The first, for my escape to Watertown. The second, for my  attempted escape to Canada, swimming across the Saint Lawrence river. My goal was to swim across the river, and make a press statement from Canada, when I reached the far shore.

I pulled up on an island, Chimney Island, a good mile downstream. Border patrol had been alerted, and my red trunks were seen by a T.A. with binoculars, when I came down to the shore for a drink of water. On the island, I found an old wet carpet that had washed ashore. I set it up as a damp windbreak, intending to finish the crossing the next day. But as I lay in my wet enclave, I heard branches snapping. Angry law enforcement was on my tail. Where was their sense of humor? It was a quick bounce on to 007 for the second time.

From 007 I sent my attending physician a steamy love note. Dr. Susan Thomas. I was really crushing on her. Not a good idea. This ended me up on ward 26, with lifers, lifelong psych patients. And a two year retention. A court order, and back to 007. Now I was in deep.

My ward mates were convicted cannibals and rapists. All the cell doors had been taken off, and the inmates could circulate, room to room, at night.

Gina Ortenzi sent me a Bible, it got passed security. Brother Stephen sent a Rosary he had strung. That got through too. I got down on my knees, on to the business of prayer.

“Life is an illusion”. It was my assigned duty to change the world.

Ward 007 was part of a complex of buildings built of red quarry stone in the 1800’s. The walls were bloodstained. Iron bars on the windows. Cold and dark, and damp. Centipedes and cockroaches crawled the walls and floors. Rock and roll music blared from 6:00 am. until 9:00 pm at night. If everyone behaved, smokes were passed out every three hours. Big hearted Mac MacDonald would sometimes bring hot coffees on a Sunday afternoon. If we walked on water we were given seventy-five cents for a pop from the machine out in the foyer. That was a real treat.

But my ward mates were dangerous, and I grew weary of the constant threat. I was focused, and I was trained. Though Bill Dahl was six foot four, and 325 pounds, I backed him into the corner and let him know the word. There was fire in my eyes, and he relented.

As I lay on my back, asleep, in the middle of the night, something awakened me. I opened my eyes, and the vampire man hovered over my face, about to bite my throat. I screamed. He bowed deeply, backed out and left

The next morning, I waited until they passed meds, and passed smokes. As he took his first drag of the day, I hit him hard in the jaw. I knocked him down. He came up feet first, and kicked me in the face. Then staff jumped in. I don’t think I was injected for that one, as it was seen as justified self defense. He claimed he was struck by lightning, and was discharged two days later.

I was on my knees in prayer before the Bible. Sometimes for days at a time. My nose started to bleed, and bled for hours. I did not stem the flow. The radio said I “was squashing passion blood”. The chaplain would sneak through to check on me. They didn’t have to tell me that I was in trouble. I could hear huge snakes slithering on the floor around me, as I closed my eyes in prayer.

Then the lightening started. First in my mind’s eye. Then on the inside of my eyelids. Then lightening started coming down through the ceiling, and in through the walls. Staff checked on me in the cold dungeon, and retreated aghast in fear.

I had starting refusing medication two weeks earlier. Medication is the usual avenue of control. The voices on the radio said the stones would begin to cry. And true to the voices, blue fluid started seeping from the stony dungeon walls.

They started checking the waste baskets, and outgoing garbage, making sure I could not pass a note to anyone on the outside. I was in prayer, day and night. I remember a dove coming to my window one morning. Another time, a butterfly.  These were omens of life, signs of hope.

Violent, dangerous, inmates were admitted after midnight, and healed and discharged before dawn.

Christmastime came. I started a fast. The psychiatrist and staff were really upset with this. They planned a huge feast on the unit for the inmates and staff to celebrate together. An unbelievable blessing. My family sent a shipment of gifs from Amherst.

I refused to open the gifts. They were shared between staff and patients. I have no idea what they sent. Except one black brother was given a white sweat suit and hoody. The guard’s wives sent in salads, sides, and desserts. The guards set up a grill, steaks for everyone. But I just curled up under a white blanket, deep in the pain of a black fast.

They directed my energies, to help them in their gambling, by putting chocolate bars in my cell, and naming their team. I truly had the world on my shoulders. It was the end of days, and I was their alone.

The voices on the wards TV set said, “ C.I.A. psychic bridges gap between church and state”. But my dates before Judge Blackstone were coming.

As I stood before the judge, in shackles, he asked if I ever said anything about the Bible’s “beast, or number 666”. Staff offered that I had. From his bench he ordered medication by force, by syringe, in huge doses. Then he signed a two year retention.

Then he put me before a jury of twelve. I was in too deep a state to present and defend myself. Only one kind lady on my jury said, “he is not dangerous, he is not insane, I can see this by the look in his eyes.

Back on the ward, by escort again, they started massive doses of medicine. The lightening ceased, and the miracles were no more.

But they were not completely without compassion. I think they would have honored and celebrated me, over time, had I stayed up North.

Fist fights and wrestling were distasteful for me. I was a good wrestler, trained hard for five years in school. I took on a lot of guys bigger than myself. And I could get my point across without hurting another person, or being hurt. But fist fights were onerous. And I only resorted to fists when I felt endangered.

It was late winter, 1987. I was still on 007. I had made a couple of strong allies, friends. Ken Potter and Jeff Brazee. We squared off in amicable wrestling matches. I quickly lost both matches. I was back on meds, and in a weakened state. I have not wrestled since.

On the wall, at 007, was a large metal box. Three feet by three feet by fifteen inches. It was painted tan. There was a green light on it. Lit. The Spirit spoke to me, “assault terminator”. A mass execution system.

This is where reality, illusion, and delusion become mixed up. I was told the entire building was scheduled to be bulldozed the next spring. A staff worker told me there was a basement under us. In the basement were coffins, with screens over the face holes. At an earlier time, the coffins were used for control and punishment. Today we use haloperidol, which I have been told is used in Russia, and other fascist regimes, as a method of torture.

Flashback to 1979. I visited the monastery. I was in a psychotic state. As I shared, they drove me to a psych facility in Elmira. It was about what you’d expect. But there was one significant curiosity. In the male shower there were sixteen showerheads about six feet off the floor. Above each showerhead about ten inches was a spigot, about the size of a nickel. This wondered me for a year before the answer came. Gas chambers were in place.

Let me switch up to something a little brighter. Before he died, Dad  commented that I had reformed myself, and that it could have turned out a lot worse.”

Katie commented, “could have turned out a lot worse is such a classic Grandpa compliment’.

Nine years ago, he took me with him on a European adventure. We crossed the Atlantic on a huge ship, and visited Portugal, Spain, France, and Italy. Dad had a chance to see me in a different light. He began to accept my vocational choice, as we communicated more often, and with greater respect for one another.

Now back to 007, in 1987. This is where it goes beyond what could ever be plausible.

Somewhere in South America was a Nazi war criminal named Joseph Mengele. He was on his death bed. His death prayer was my destruction, and the end of the world I was called to intercede for. The prayers, the endless rock and roll, the smokes, the endless dangers.

There were two calendars on the wall, with a two week gap between where one ended, and the other began. We were caught in the gap between charted days. And 007 seven went on, and on, and on, and on. They had begun to sew labels into my clothes, “Michael McLean 007”.

      Katie comments, “this is a fantastic metaphor for that time”.    

 

The courts medicines began to take effect. I came back to a more normal place. The attendant voices said that I had “ascended”. This meant that my Soul, and my Spirit were now in God. And in a very special way. I continued in activism, to make things as good for my fellow patient-inmates as possible. I reported staff when we were denied food, and did whatever I could to make the hospital a livable place.

We were sleeping on beds with thick plastic mattresses. There were cracks and holes in the old plastic, from wear. The mattresses were heavy, thoroughly soaked, and full of decomposing urine from many years of incontinent patients. Laying in bed at night one would be soaked with old urine. What a smell!  I penned a note to administration, and Halleluiah, we got new mattresses! Can you believe it? These people actually had a soul.

Flashback to high school, on the wrestling team. Team mate Jacob Johler got teased and mocked mercilessly. The entire wrestling bus would chant his name. “Jacob Johler, Jacob Johler”. I got bullied too, but it started in elementary school. In eighth grade the entire bus of boys got off at my stop, and formed a circle around me. They forced me to fight a boy much bigger than myself. I managed to defend myself, and blood running from my nose appeased my antagonists.

In eighth grade I was invited to join the wrestling squad. I did well in gym class. The gym teacher was the wrestling coach, and I was conscripted to join the junior high squad. I won a starting place on the team, and tied for first place in my first tournament.

In ninth grade we moved to a new school district, and I had a whole new group of bullies to deal with. And they started on me, but relented when they learned that I was a wrestler. In four years of high   school, I only got into one fistfight. I got hit with a bowl of jello from the frat boys table, in the lunchroom.

Again I was confronted, and had to fight my way past them. I chose the smallest of them, and hit him hard in the face. They all backed away, and let me pass. It was a feeling of elation. But honestly, I did not like fistfights, they scared me. However, I should have been more willing to defend myself, and the others who were victimized. The retarded and the awkward were so often castigated.

But now it was my turn to take the brunt of the teasing and the threats on the wrestling bus. I was cornered, it was a bad situation getting worse. The wrestler bullies were the toughest kids in school. However, an older man I knew, Nick West, had given me a hunting knife. I carried it in my boot.

As the bullies pressed and pressured me, I pulled my knife. “Which of you mother fuckers want to dance”, I asked. That was the end of the bullying problem for me in high school.

      Katie interjects, “I think everyone feels they should have stood up more for themselves and others in high school”.  

I am embarrassed to say, however, that I did some teasing from time to time.

Nick West was a man on my paper route. At fifteen years old, I was delivering the Courier Express. A paper that had been founded by Mark Twain a hundred fifty years ago. Nick was into hunting, muscle cars, drinking and women. He was married to a beautiful woman, with two beautiful children. We often chatted when I rang his bill to collect. He invited me to go hunting with him. Mom and Dad consented, and I was excited.

He was a pedophile, and raped me. How could his wife have not known? I did not know how to get out of the relationship. He promised he would kill himself if I told my father.

As of last year, according to white pages .com was still alive in San Antonio Texas. Only when I turned nineteen did I succeed in escaping him.

Now let me speak on the challenge of the artist. Ones work, visual, musical, written, should vibrate with the attributes of life. Vital. One’s work should be a force for healing and change. This is the highest goal of the artist. One’s work should be alive.

We’ve been discussing a scripture. Acts 19:12. Here handkerchiefs are blessed by the Apostle Paul. The cloths are taken to the sick, where healings and deliverance occur. Our artwork, writing, music, should be imbued with this same grace.

Here is a quote for you.  “The psychic and the psychotic are in the same waters. However, while the psychic is easily swimming, the psychotic is floundering and fighting for his life.

Up north, at Saint Lawrence psych center, a mental and psychic force was at play. It was called “sex in the spirit”. Note this is a dynamic of the mental hospital. It is having sexual union with another without touching their body, without being present with them.

In the hospital there is confinement, lack of exercise, refined foods, medications, and a lot of people packed into a small space.  Self pleasure cannot be denied. It is the law. The person one thinks of as he or she comes is called ones “light”. It is a moment of mental and spiritual union. It happens every day in the mental hospital. It can be developed to the point where the soul of your spiritual lover is pulled right through your body. This is called “halua”. And ultimately it becomes a step on the path to psychic abilities.

We learn that one can love through mental channels. And one can do physical combat through mental channels as well. The voices offered that sex in the spirit is how churches are built.

Here is a tip for you, when you are in the presence of someone who is reading your mind, against your will. Silently recite the “Glory, Oh Glory be to the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, as it was in the beginning, is now, and ever shall be, world without end, amen”. This jams the frequencies.

Now on to another difficult point where reality, illusion, and delusion compete for space in these pages. There was an antenna on top of the Lafayette Hotel in 1985. It may have been part of a radio station at one time. It may have been part of execution by electrocution machinery  at one time. A time when our government was secretly executing people, as part of a purge. An attempt to self empower through human sacrifice.

I remember three booths, in cages, with chairs, and wiring harnesses for ankles, wrists, and head. All the equipment intact. There was also equipment for processing corpses.

I was homeless at the time. The counselors were on my tail. I scraped up enough cash for a room at the Lafayette. It was a dingy old building in 1985. I snuck up through the stairways, and on to the roof. The electric chairs were unmistakable. They may still be there today.

From this hotel, I sought shelter at the mission. My plan was to head for the mountains. The staff at the mission confiscated my bags. I had to call the sheriff.

They released my bags and I headed to the bus station. I was in way over my head. Ultimately I ended up in the psych center in Ogdensburg. It was drawn to my attention there, that there was an antenna on the roof, over one of the therapy rooms. I suspect another electric chair. The antennas are used to transmit the energies, soul and spirit, up and out. So as to mitigate the creation of a poltergeist.          Though the purpose of the antenna may be questioned, the electric chairs were unmistakable.

Ken Potter was one of the brothers, allies that I had. He was with me on C-ward, and 007. At that point the inmates were factioning themselves off into two groups. The Reds and the Blues. We were choosing sides. It was more a social discussion, and never evolved into violence. It was a discussion of basic beliefs, like sexual orientation, the use of street drugs, and the use of violence.

I went to the O.T. studio, and got red paint, blue paint, and a canvass. I showed Ken how red and blue mixed together make purple. And there was no need for the patients to divide into groups.

I was a dominate male on all the wards, until my third stint on high security. There I lost so much weight and strength I could no longer stand as leader, or driver, on the wards. The station of alpha male required great mental, physical, and spiritual strength. It was time for me to be pushed aside by fresher, younger inmates

Ken Potter ended his life in suicide. He slit his wrists on 007, with the pop top from an Ensure can. He struggled hard for years over his relationship with his father. I understand.

Segue over to my second time on ward 26. There was a powerful sexual spirit upon me. A force. I was compelled into a brief homosexual encounter. It only lasted seconds, but it drastically changed my physical chemistry and spiritual energy. I was humiliated, but could not escape the change it brought.

I needed to confess to the chaplain, and move on, but I was too ashamed.

The path of my life changed again. I really lost it. Here I truly became a mental patient. I let myself become a mythical pixie in a world of dwarves, elves, and evil trolls. It was 1987. Security police visited the ward to observe. “So our agent has become a pixie”. This is the reason it’s taken me 31 years to come forth with all this.

Warren was the name of the man with whom I had the encounter. He was a psychic, with a bevy of familiar spirits. He often spoke of things only the spirit world could know. He was not evil.

There were twenty-five men on the ward. We were locked in together, on a back ward, way up in the North Country. Things happened at night that are too difficult to retell.

Whether a man was good or evil had nothing to do with IQ. There were retarded men that were good. There were geniuses that were evil.

Bobby Conwell was a black man, retarded. But his essence was goodness. He was dumped into the institution years before I got there. He was always one of the first ones to awake in the morning. He always managed to find clean clothes. Which was more than what most of us could do.  Every morning he was the first one in the day room. He would be davening, praying before the clock one the wall. Always in his hands would be a beautifully printed number, different each day. Three digits, usually. That was our number for the day.

One evening, after the rooms were unlocked, he invited me in to see his treasure. In the bottom drawer of his footlocker was a collection of crayons. Over the years he had pilfered, taken, crayons from his OT and craft sessions. He had thousands of crayons. Bobby’s treasures.

When I was young, nineteen years old in 1974, I got my first car. It was a 1962 Chevy pickup. Nick sold it to me for two hundred dollars. He said that it was a great deal, with only 20,000 miles on it. But it was beat to shit. I realize now that it had 120,000 maybe 220,000 miles on it.

That was the way Nick did business. “He’d screw a snake, if someone would hold its head”, his father said of him.

Back in those days, I’d try to do all my own car repairs. I did a tune up, alternator, water pump, and starter, and had taken a job in a body shop. But with the illness, I gave up my license, and did not drive for fifteen years. When I finally got back into a vehicle, I found myself dependant on mechanics. Today, I have a service contract on my van. I depend on my handyman, and a girl from church is helping around the house. I’m dependant on others. It seems my province, nowadays, is prayer, piano, this writing, and hopefully, soon, I will be back in my studio.

Dana, my brother in law called me tonight. He spoke of an old friend, Dorinda. I remember playing Frisbee in front of her house with my sister. It would have been 1974 or 1975. I remember a conversation we had, as we sat on the curb, “Christianity will cease to be in our generation”. We saw the Lord’s church as being an unnecessary control. A control we needed to throw off of our shoulders. I never even considered, at that time, that I would dive deep into the heart of the Christian faith.

      Katie writes: through all these experiences I can see what incredibly high expectations you’ve put on yourself to be in control, especially of your thoughts and feelings. That must be incredibly important to you, understandably, but also incredibly exhausting.  

Recently, about four years ago, I was cleaning Mom and Dad’s basement on October Lane. I found an old letter that Dad wrote to Mom. Dad was tired and frustrated with my illness. He wanted to abandon me to the care of the state, and move to Florida. Mom wanted to stay close, and attend to my care. This caused a division that almost destroyed the marriage. It was three years before Dad said, it could have turned out a lot worse”.

I realized, early on in my illness, there was one thing I craved, one thing I needed most of all. And that was my father’s praise. It was the one thing I could never achieve. This insidious need drove me deep into penance, fasting and prayer.

I had my conversation experience, meaning I accepted the Lord, in the fall of 1975. Right after the hit-run that left me at death’s door. In the three years after the day of my salvation, I fasted for hundreds of days. Sometimes for weeks at a time, with absolutely nothing, not even water.

I remember driving home from a church, after having gone for seven days without food or water. I was listening to the van’s radio, as the show’s host explained that four days without water can be fatal. For the next seven days, I took a little water each day. This extreme abstinence really impacted the chemistry of my body and mind. It made a bad situation worse.

I was an enlightenment seeker. I’d experienced other realities on drugs. I believed that meditation, fasting, prayer, and reading scripture would deliver me to a higher plane, a better place. I was confused, and disappointed, when it led to the psych wards.

My first admission was into the psych unit at Buffalo General. I remember looking around the ward on the day of my commitment, and asking myself, “so is this the Promised Land?”My first stint at Buffalo General was two months of fasting and prayer. My second trip to General was a battle of wills against the staff workers. They were threatening and disrespectful.

One of the other inmates snuck in some marijuana. We got high, and the forces took over. I emptied a bottle of lotion on the forehead of one of the other inmates as he slept.  Got myself in trouble there.  However he ended up in nursing school, and came back to the unit as a student on rounds.

One evening, after dark, they corralled all the patients into the day room, turned out the lights, and started screaming insults and threats at the patients. That night several of the mail guards overpowered me and held me flat on the floor. They repeatedly jabbed me in the belly with a long, long pin. I held these workers as enemies, and they hated me in return. Because of my rebellion, it was decided that I was to be transferred to the state psych facility on Buffalo’s west side. B.P.C. was a notoriously tough facility.

I had a girlfriend, Robbie, who was a patient on another ward. We had met, and fallen into a friendship, as inpatients. Somehow, late at night, she made her way through the locked doors, and into my room. She crawled under the covers with me, and we spoke in quiet tones. She warned me of my coming transfer. I wanted to make love with her, but Robbie had a word for me. “You are in a state of Grace, Michael. Let us not make love tonight. If you are clean before God, no real harm can come to you. Stay right before God, and you’ll be alright”.

At that moment the room’s door swung wide, and three staff workers came in with flashlights. There was no way I could hide Robbie under my covers, in my bed. They whisked her away, and I never saw her again. Incidentally, she was there because she had a brain tumor.

Back into handcuffs the next morning, and in to the wagon. B.P.C. was a different world. Walter Herr, Mark Porter, Keith Bennett, don’t remember all the names.

A six foot two inch ex-marine named Joe Wolf showed up shortly after I got there. I remember him violently slamming the door out to the porch. I pulled my fingers out of the way, just in time. Or I’d have lost my fingers. It was a porch on the second floor, with wrought iron bars to the outside. The walls were brick. Over the days, as Joe settled down, we became friends. We’d slam our fists into the bricks until our knuckles bled. I’m sure this was some sort of rite of passage.

Joe and I were allies, we became friends. Soon Bobby Conwell fell in with us. Joe produced a little nail clipper, with a file. We cut ourselves, and became blood brothers, with Bobby looking on. Bobby wanted to be blood brothers too. Joe cut Bobby’s finger, we all mingled blood. It was a lot for Bobby to deal with, he started to cry. But alliances were made, and somehow, Good ruled on the ward.

Flashback again to my days working the carnival. Soon after an incident with the Motordrome’s bikers, I left the carnival, and headed east, toward the Atlantic coast. As I hitched, I was picked up by a young man. He, and his wife graciously let me camp on their porch, In Swansboro, North Carolina. I found work on the docks, in Moorehead City, fifteen miles up the coast. I was helping on the boats, unloading the catch, and cleaning the fish. The pay was fifteen dollars a day.

I’d worked all day, until 9:00 pm., then walked to the edge of town. There I stuck out my thumb, to hitch a ride home. I’d been given the address of a sea captain with whom I could get out on the water. A commercial fisherman. This was encouraging.

It was Saturday night, well after dark. I was standing under a street light. There was a small, white, clapboard church there. One room, and a steeple. And you know, I’d been seeking hard. I checked the door on the church. It was open, and dark, inside. On the wall, behind the altar, was a big picture of Jesus. It was illuminated, through a window, by the street light outside.

I knelt at the altar rail, and searched my soul for a prayer. “Jesus, if you are the Son of God”, I prayed, “and God. If you hear and answer prayers, please show me the way”. And again, I prayed the Lord’s Prayer.

Looking to my left, there was a piano. I sat on the piano bench, and struggled to compose a note of praise. Then the lights went on. Someone was walking up the aisle on the old wooden floor behind me. I opened a hymn book, and with great hesitation, I played. The man behind me sang the hymn’s words as I struggled to play.

And then he asked, “and who might you be, and where are you from?” I was filthy from life on the road. My hair was shoulder length, and matted with filth. This man told me this was his church, he was the pastor. And that a neighbor had seen me enter the building, but when no lights were turned on, they called him.

He informed me there was Sunday school and service the next morning. And I promised I’d be there. Note that at this point the psychic had begun to yield to the psychotic. It had begun to be a down spiraling path to the destruction.

I went back out to the roadside, and stuck out my thumb. After about twenty minutes I got picked up by a young man in a black and red muscle car, with two Dobermans inside. I started talking. I remember talking about the public schools I’d been to in New York, and how it seemed like an effective system. But I talked too long, and he drove me too far.

He dropped me off on the roadside, and I began the walk back to where I was staying. I passed a small bar, and dropped in for a Budweiser. The bar’s patrons were eye balling me. I was not welcome there. I finished my beer, and resumed the hike back to where I was sleeping.

A car came off the road, and on to the sandy shoulder. I dodged it, and it missed me. A second time they tried, and again I side stepped. At this point I told myself to just walk in a straight line. Don’t flinch, don’t dodge, don’t be scared, just walk in a straight line.

If I’d been sane and sober, I’d of hid in the woods. I’d been walking on the right side of the road, on the sandy shoulder. I turned around as the car came off the road, speeding toward me. There was no time to jump out of the way. They hit me, hard.

I landed in the ditch. I thought they were going to come back and kill me. I needed to get ready to fight. But as I attempted to get off the ground all the shattered bones separated.

      Here Kate has a comment.

Mike, First off, I owe you an apology. It has taken me way too long to get your journals back to you.

Partly, it was out of my control- moving between three continents, having all my belongings in storage, and in cargo ships for long periods along the way, readjusting again to a new place, new job, new life, making new friends.

      Your journals, when they arrived, sat in my nightstand for awhile. Always on my list, but the project seemed too immense, and I was always too tired or too busy.

       But then the pandemic hit, and everything slowed way down. Not having to commit to the embassy everyday has given me an extra many hours a week, and work is slower, but in many ways more hectic as we all adjust to working from home.

      But the point is, I read through your journals, and once flights open up again between Colombia and the U.S. (Colombia has banned international flights until September to try to keep the coronavirus at bay. ) I will send them back to you. (Important to note: Colombia is doing a much better job handling the coronavirus than the U.S. We’ve been staying at home since March, and only leaving to go to the grocery store and take the dog for walks, but the death rate is a tiny fraction of what it is in the States, due to these public health measures and mandatory mask wearing in public.

      To your Hydrocodone Chronicles, you have the start to a really amazing body of work. Your James Joyce style retelling is perfectly suited to the subject matter. The fact like accounts you give to both the things that happened as well as things you experienced, physically, emotionally, psychologically, are palpable. The episodes you experienced before and during treatment are so important. If I were you, I might consider turning this into a memoir of your experiences, and the effect Clozapine has had on your life. I think it is particularly important to document the abuse you suffered as treatment. Things that really stood out to me were the way in which there really wasn’t a difference between incarceration for criminal reasons and incarceration for mental health reasons. This is a story that needs to be told, and the way you tell it is so important because of it’s matter of fact nature.

      Another important topic that comes up again and again, that is related, is the police brutality. They say that when all you have is hammers, every problem looks like a nail. The way the police interacted with you proves that saying true. This is especially poignant given the country’s current grappling with human rights and the role of police. The complete lack of community based mechanisms to manage mental health, and support those with mental health issues.

      In the retelling of your time in the mental facilities, and jumping between that and episodes, some psychotic, some not, from before or between incarcerations, there is no maudlin sentimentality. The plot is simple, yet highly complex and difficult in subject matter. This juxtaposition lends credibility, and makes your voice and tone in retelling your stories very genuine and very clear. I don’t know if this was a side effect of the hydrocodone, but if you are able to write about these episodes in such a straight forward way without it’s aid, I would definitely encourage you to do so.

It was my first admission to B.P.C. They put me on ward 84, also known as the North Unit. I wasn’t scared, I was terrified.

I sat on the floor in the day room, fellow inmates all around me. The television was blaring. Bedlam. One of the patients named Manny Gold, kept picking up and dropping a chair, right by me. After a couple hours of this, I got to my feet, and punched him in the face. This was a punishable offense. Routine punishment was a syringe full of thorazine, and time locked in seclusion.

After days with no food, they brought me a dinner. Roast chicken and potatoes.  It smelled great. I tried to eat but couldn’t keep it down. Dinner of vomit.  Voices, forces, damnation, and hell.

There is a pecking order on the unit, just like a flock of chickens. Or a hierarchy, like a pack of wolves. And I was not going to be dominated by any of the others.

I would think that most of my wardmates have died by this time, as mental illness is a serious affliction, and significantly shortens the life expectancy.

It was back in the day when cigarettes were provided for all, by the State. But just enough tobacco to keep one constantly craving.  A T.A. would call out “ciggy’s”, and we’d all line up at the nursing station. Medication first, of course, then a smoke. They’d light us up, and we’d all shuffle down to the smoker to finish our cigarettes. And there I’d put on a little show of force.

Anyway, that is how I got started on tobacco. Tobacco is a powerful addiction. It will bring one down to a lower level, and without question complicate a mental illness.

I demonstrated a few basic karate moves. Right up close and personal. I carved out a space for myself high up in the hierarchy. I still had to deal with a threat, violent, or sexual, from time to time, but I succeeded in making room for myself.

But please understand, I was only twenty years old. I’d grown up in the lily white community of Amherst N.Y. Nothing in my life had prepared me for this. In high school I got bullied. And that is part of the reason I ended up on the unit. Though on the unit I was often threatened, I no longer backed away from fights. There was no place to back in to.

It was right before Christmas, early on in my illness. I was decompensating. Mom called Crises Services, and the counselors came over. They told me I needed to go to the hospital with them, but I refused. They called the police. Within ten minutes there were four squad cars outside, lights flashing, and the house was full of armed policeman.

They cornered me in the kitchen and told me that I had to go with them. I’d cooked barley in the coffee pot, hamburger with peas on the front burner. They asked me what I was cooking. The voices told me to tell them it was “turtle soup”.

They pushed me into a tight corner. There was a knife on the counter. I grabbed, and brandished the knife. A bread knife with a twelve inch blade. They came at me with chairs from the dining room. No need to say I was quickly taken down, cuffs and leg irons, and thrown in the back of a cop car.

I could hear the cops in conversation in the front seat. “I would have shot him had it not been his mother’s house at Christmas time”.

The first days on the ward were the most difficult. On the North Unit, I neither ate nor drank for four days. Only snow, I would go out on the porch and eat a little snow.

There was another lifer, Walter Herr. A lifer is a lifelong psych patient. Usually referring to inpatients. He was a big man, and very menacing. He paced the unlocked rooms of the unit uttering guttural noises. To me….to you….to me….to you….to me….to you. He was scary. It was like being caged with a predator. He had everyone scared, staff and patients alike. It was my turn to do my duty. I hit him in the face. He attacked me, and then staff jumped in. And they locked him in seclusion. But he was unlocked on the next shift.

It was dark outside, after dinner, and our rooms had been unlocked. As soon as he was unlocked, he started hunting for me. I could hear him getting closer as he searched room by room. “To me, to you….to me, to you….to me, to you…. to me, to you.

Someone on staff anticipated my dilemma, and left an iron rod on my bed. It was three feet long, solid steel, one half inch diameter. My roommate at the time was Johnny Cardos. I gave him the rod, to use if needed, and I curled up against the wall, under his bed.

“To me, to you….to me, to you….to me, to you….Walter came into our room. I could hear his breathing. I held my breath. He looked around, grunted, and continued his search. The next morning he was gone, no longer on the unit. He was shipped over to high security in the middle of the night, being much too dangerous for the general population.

The demon spirits were overpowering at times, a physical weight and pressure forcing my head into the toilet, and my face into the urine soaked floor. Evil spirits within the body and mind as well, bringing fear, confusion, and mental pain. And it was all made worse by medications that did not do what they were intended to do. Medications that seemed to conduit evil spirits into the body and mind.

I had a single dollar bill folded up small and in my wallet. Somehow it disappeared. The voices, audible enunciations through the ward mates around me said , “ it was the spirits that steal”. You could be certain that any valuable possession, clothes, jewelry, money, was going to disappear.

The voices wanted me to start a fight book. A journal of all the fist fights and wrestling matches I was in. But I wanted not to do that, as it could have served as evidence against me.

 

There was another patient, Keith Bennett, a silly and narcissistic boy. But still esteemed dangerous enough to warrant hospitalization. Keith believed that he turned into a vampire bat at night. He was into body building, and got himself into really good shape. But he broke out all his teeth, hanging by his teeth from a towel.  Whenever there was blood spilled, Keith was there to lick up the floor. He had a pact with some of the female night shift workers. They would give him used women’s napkins. He would steep  them as if they were tea bags.

Keith shared a hallucination with me. His belief was that there are two guardians of the universe. One at each end. They are huge polar bears. One is named Walter, the other is named Herr.

Back in the day, on ward eighty four, North Unit, we had girls from the nursing school visiting us once a week. This was an incredible privilege. It was wonderful being able to chat and lust a little bit.

One of the boys on the unit, Mark Porter, was overwhelmed with the opportunity to mingle with these coeds. The story goes that Mark was intelligent and came from a good family. But he blew his mind on acid. He’d stick his long thumbnails into the electrical outlets, which caused lesions on his arms and hands. He’d raise the windows to the outside and chant his mantra. “North the Carolina, South Carolina, Kentucky, Alabama.” He did this several times a day.  An itinerary of the states I visited with the carnival.

Anyway, he lost his cool with the nursing students, and bared his erect penis. He was reprimanded, and that was the end of the ladies visits.

And don’t let me forget Rudy. Slight build. Older.  He never, ever, spoke to anyone. He was not one of my friends, but not an enemy either.  His story was that he had one escape, from which he returned with a box of pistol ammo.  It was summertime. I had grounds privileges. I picked a marigold, and brought it back to the unit with me. A thought came to me. “Rudy has never heard the words’ I love you’”. I gave him the flower, and said “I love you”. He responded instantly and forcefully, “if you love me then suck my cock”. That’s how mental illness works. It was the only time in the months and years I was there that I ever heard him speak.

Let’s fast forward to C- ward, admissions, at Saint Lawrence in Ogdensburg. I had a ward mate named David Mignon. What a kind and gentle man. Previous to our meeting by a couple of years, he popped out his eyeballs with his thumbs. One eyeball was completely destroyed, the other healed in which he had partial vision. When He behaved well, they let him use a glass eyeball that looked like a real eye. When he was not in good graces he had to use a solid white glass orb.

There were times when Dave stood six foot two, and times when Dave stood  five two. Another illusion of the mental hospital. He told of his ride to the hospital with the state police. And that the cops were lighting their cigarettes off a magical back tooth. David was totally immersed in the magic of sex in the spirit. It made the hospitalization into a game he enjoyed.

And John Armstrong, another misguided prophet. They let him have sharpened pencils, and he prowled the ward at night. I was compelled to sleep under my bed. He said that his brotherhood had found the skull of Jesus Christ, and in that he was all powerful.

And  then  Harley, dear Harley. A child in a man’s body. Stuffed toys and dolls. But when we sparred, he always knew where the next strike was going to come from. He knew the words to folk songs, and would lead us in singing. When the tested him, he came out as retarded. So they shipped him over to  Sunmount  in Tupper Lake.

And then there was an old timer, a woman, with whom I would have coffee in the mall. She showed me the quarter size holes through her temples. Skin had grown over, but the holes in the skull bone remained. These were the sites of lobotomies. She was about eighty, and had been a patient since childhood. I put my fingers on those holes, as a Doubting Thomas touching the wounds of Christ.

Sometimes you fight, sometimes you run. Let me take you back to my days with the carnival, and a time I chose to run.

I was homeless. My dear friend Dorinda let me stay at her house. Her mom, sister and brother lived there as well. They could see I was troubled, and extended their kindness. In a casual conversation she told of a friend that joined the circus. “What a genius idea!” I thought. I jumped the fence behind her house. Her house backed up on route 290. I stuck out my thumb, and hitched down Holland, New York, where I had a girlfriend named Patti.  I stayed with her for a week, as we made plans to meet the carnival at the state fair in Syracuse. We were drinking, broke, and desperate. Locals came by, and  bought her a pizza for sex.

She was Native American, and we spent a day in the woods behind the roadside motel in which we stayed. As she painted my face with mud, she told me about a young man’s rite of initiation. There was a railroad track laid through the woods back there. She cut a staff for me from a sapling, and told me to lift it high.  As I raised the staff, the ground began to tremble from an oncoming train. The train passed, the engineer waved as I held my staff. “Now” Patti said, “we can leave on our journey”.

We left for Syracuse early the next morning. Though it was only two hundred miles away, it took us three days. The first night we slept under a bridge, an overpass. The second night we slept near a gas station, in a field of waist high grass. Patti wanted to put on fresh clothes, and to do that she had to stand. She was naked as car headlights illuminated her young body. I could tell by their voices they had seen her, and were coming to check us out. We prostrated in the high grass. I drew my knife, and scolded her for being stupid. However, for unknown reasons, these men decided to leave us alone. I didn’t thank God then, I do now.

Finally, we made it to the fair grounds. Now we had to find work. I found work on the Flyin’ Bobs. Patti found work at a softball toss.

Redeye and Bobby had been with the ride for several weeks. They were Native Americans, as well. Redeye was a dangerous drinker. Bobby was awol  from the Army. They both had girls. Then there was John, a girl named Bev or Paula, or too much street drugs, and myself.

We had to figure out living space, and food. When traveling from city to city, we slept wherever we could hide. However, when a fair was in session, we camped under the ride, or in the shipping containers in which the ride was transported by railway, and semi, from town to town. At night the walls crawled with roaches. I’d never seen a roach before.

I really tried to build a family out of the gang of misfits that we were. But I lacked wisdom. I was twenty years old at the time.

In Nashville, one of our girls had to go to the E.R. with a piece of glass in her eye. They admitted her to the psych ward. At the time I did not understand the way the psych system works.

Someone produced a camp stove and a kettle. One of the girls had a car. So there was a way to get to a grocery store. We started making soup and stew. I hoped we would become a perfect bunch of hippies, successful in a communal lifestyle.

Another seeking soul gave me a book written by a prophet and teacher named Stephen, who led a commune down in Tennessee.  It was about life in community, the psychic experience, achieving enlightenment, and getting to a higher place. The commune was known as The Farm. Visiting the Farm was, and still is on my list. The brother who gave me the book “Monday Night Class “, opined that most of the commune’s residents had done time in mental hospitals.

One of my goals in life, at that time, was to establish myself as a drug dealer. To that end, I bought two ounces of weed. It was called Kentucky Blue Grass. I bought it for twenty dollars an ounce, and sold it for twenty dollars an ounce. Absolutely no business sense there.

A fellow carney wanted an ounce, and he offered me a pistol as payment. I heard my father’s voice say, “don’t touch that gun”.

Anyway, we hitched from Syracuse to Nashville, our next stop. We rendezvoused with our rides. And from there to…..it’s lost in a haze. Let’s just say it was Charleston. We set up the ride, and worked day one of the carnival. The park closed at eight o’clock pm. , and all the Flyin’Bobs  went into town to do some drinking. All but me. I hung back. I was trying to get a handle on my drug and alcohol use.

Nine o’clock came, then ten o’clock. And John came back to our camp. Beaten up, bloody, and needing the emergency room.  Then back came Bobby, his shirt soaked in blood. And then Redeye, cut and bleeding bad.  The man who owned our ride was named Dick, and he took my coworkers to the hospital, and stayed with them until they were stitched up and ready to come back to our camp.

There was one ruling gang on the mid-way, the Motordrome. They were the uncontested ruling gang. They were bikers, stunt riders, and they really were tough.

Well, at a bar in town, our girls started fussing with their girls. It turned into a cat fight between the women, then everybody jumped in. And the Flyin’ Bobs took a spanking.

While all my guys were at the hospital, the bikers came to our camp to get me. There were four of them, and one girl. The girl I knew. We spent a night, after the park had closed, walking the dark and deserted midway. We talked, shared a blanket, and kept each other warm. She and I were friends.

One of the bikers had a beer bottle. One flicked out a switchblade. One grabbed an iron railing from the House of Magic Mirrors. One was unarmed. I picked up a big monkey wrench, to use as a weapon, as they approached. I told them I didn’t want to fight, but they charged me.

Their girl, my friend, told me to put down the wrench.  I threw it down on the ground, and ducked as a beer bottle whizzed over my head.

Think back now, two weeks before I’d been offered a pistol. Where would I be tonight if I’d used a pistol that night?

I sprinted down the darkened midway, running as fast as I ever ran, with four attackers on my heels.  I sent out thoughts of thanksgiving to Joe Shifflet, our wrestling coach, who trained us to be strong and fast. I cut in behind the girly show, and saw a small utility trailer, unhitched, and empty. I ducked in, under there. And curled up in a tiny ball. But they were hunting me. I could hear their voices, and their footsteps as they searched for me. But at least for the moment, I evaded tragedy again.

Wounds healed, stitches were removed, and we returned to a more normal life. Though a carney’s struggle for survival is far from normal. John and I wrestled off a couple times. The first time I caught him in a hold where I could have taken out his eyes. But I was never into doing that type of damage. And John knew I shown mercy. In our second contest, he could have taken out my eyes, but reflected my passivism.

At about this point I dropped the purple pill sold as mescaline. Here I communed with the guiding spirits of the Native Americans with whom I had fallen in. It was night time. I was tripping and walking the fairgrounds. I came across a huge bug on the ground. It was four inches long, buzzing, spinning, glowing, and communicating it’s thoughts to me. It was four inches long, with huge claws. At this moment a man in a huge Cadillac drove over to where I was standing over this huge and terrible looking bug. “What is this creature”, I asked him, as I picked the creature up off the asphalt.  A terrified look came over his face as he answered, “Oh my God, it’s Satan”.

The Great Spirit told me to put the terrible thing in my mouth. And this I did. “Now run”, said the Great Spirit. I took off running, holding the hideous creature in place with my teeth, as it tried to claw its way down my throat. I ran and ran, and ran, and ran. All night long I ran. As dawn was breaking, I found myself in a town with a small store. Above the store was a flashing yellow sign saying “mark of quality”. This was an omen to me, though it was a paltry payoff for enduring such menace.

There was a Denny’s near there. I ordered a breakfast at the counter, which was served by a young girl in her company brown skirt. I remember her eyebrows were way too thick, and that was my fault, for past sins committed. Soft bursts of sexual energy floated out from under her skirt. To my young mind, this was a manifestation of evil. Today I acknowledge sexual energy as part of our God given lives.

Somehow I found my way to a wilderness area. And there the Great Spirit taught me meditation. A meditation using starlight. This was a real step forward in my quest to know and learn. However I had serious trouble getting out of meditation and back into a normal state. I could not flip flop back and forth, as I do now. And this proved to be a great obstacle.

Dick, the man who owned the ride, had me sitting on the revolving i-beams as we set up in a new town. My legs were dangling as he worked the control booth. He swung the assembly and pinched my left leg, between beams, a foot above the ankle. I could feel the leg bones bending, almost breaking. But Dick caught himself in the nick of time, and backed off on the controls.

Dick asked me to walk with him as he brought his ticket box down to the office to be weighed. He was paid according to the weight of the tickets he collected. He let me go .I took my last draw, and headed east, for the coast.

Patti and I split up here. She headed up to Buffalo Wyoming, with hopes of making it to Hollywood, and becoming a movie star. I opened a road map, and put my finger on a destination.  Morehead City, North Carolina. Hippies were called “heads” in those days. So Morehead seemed like a good name.

There was one friend I did not get to say good bye to. He was the little man at the freak show. He stood about two feet tall, with a normal size head. He had an alcohol problem. I spent an evening with him, just letting him talk. He rambled on at length without saying anything I could make sense of.

This retelling, this book, began after taking a bad fall and breaking several ribs. This was two months ago. The hydrocodone piqued the creative process. It seems the more I write, the more I have to write about. Over the past several years I’ve been heavy on the prayer and meditation. Walking the straight and narrow. The hydro put me in an altered state. But thanks to the discipline I’ve practiced, it was a good trip, not a bad trip.

As I lay incapacitated in bed, it was not just my ribs that healed, but my whole life. I could see a very bright and fulfilling future reflecting a prayerful and sacrificial past.

The year was 1978 or 1979. I convinced myself that I was the anointed prophet to come. And to seal this prophecy I needed to I needed to perform a sacred rite. To this end I bought two white doves, and a small bird cage. I drove down to a hill called Bluemont, near where I had my hermitage three years before.

Near a woods on the mountainside, I built an altar of twelve skull size stones. I gathered wood, and built a fire. When the fire was going good, and the flames were hot, I opened up the dove with a knife and dropped it on the flames. The feathers curled as the fire consumed the dove. I stayed with the fire until the sacrificial offering was consumed, and the flames began to die back. Was this an acceptable offering, a sacrilege, or simple insanity? I still don’t know.

I took the second dove in its cage to a cousin in Portageville. She kept it, and bred it for many years.

Between 1975 and 1985 I had thirteen hospitalizations for a total of seven years of incarceration. The medications I was forced to take were unworkable. The side effects were worse than the illness. There was no refusing medications. If one said no to pills, they were administered by force, by syringe. Prolixin, stellazine, thorazine, melloril, haldol, were misery. They shut down my intellect and creative mind. They left me listless, moronic, and in endless physical and emotional discomfort.

In 1987, a write up about a breakthrough medication called clozaril, or clozapine, appeared in the New York Times. My sister Sandra mentioned it to my dad, and my dad began research it. It was being used in research trials in New York City, but was not available in western New York State.

Dad took the project on himself. He contacted Dr. Geoff Grace, clinical director of Buffalo Psychiatric Center.  Together they petitioned the New York State office of Mental Health in Albany.  And together they contacted our congressman. Based on the law called “the compassionate need clause”, they had clinical trials begun in Buffalo, through B.P.C.

The compassionate need clause allows the use of untested medicines in situations of dire need. There were about ten of us in the first group. We had to take a long battery of base line tests. Physical and mental. And submit ourselves  to  rehospitalization. I was uneasy, knowing that if things went awry, my life was on the line.

The mental part of the base line tests were a set of cognitive assessments, basic intelligence tests. Creating designs with marked blocks. Hearing a list of seven numerals, and then reciting them backwards. Naming as many animals as possible. How many words that begin with s.

The base line tests were given once a year for the next three years. But then funding was cut, and that part of the research was abandoned. I would like to take those tests again. I sometimes think, as I struggle to learn to new things, that I’ve incurred brain damage along the way.

I was going with a girl named Karen at this time. I’d known her for two years, at this time, but we had just become intimate. She encouraged my craziness, as long as it was creative. We found a rite of purification in the Old Testament. It involved burning flour with oil on it, and incense. We got a hotel room, and spent an evening in preparatory prayer, that our great experiment would be a success. The rite filled me with power. I was ready to report for readmission at the administration building at 10:00am the next morning.

The charted plan for the next three days was to take no medicine. And then begin with small doses of clozaril, and work our way upward. But when I shared with Dr. Grace that we’d prayed special prayers, the three days of purification were abrogated, and we began with 25mg. of clozaril.

The daily doses were gradually increased. At 400 mg. I began to wet the bed. I slept so deeply the need to urinate did not wake me up. At 700mg. daily I became a zombie. At 800mg. I was a dumb and dreary blob. And that is where they left me. Day in, day out. Weeks, months. I could hardly open my eyes. And then God sent an angel.

Before I went back in, I’d been staying in an outpatient residence on the hospital grounds called the SOCR. (Sokra). There was a female nurse there named Sharon. After way too long back on inpatient, she decided to visit. It was recreation time and there was a ping pong game being played in the room. But I was curled up in a corner on the floor in a dumb and useless blob. Though she formally did not have the authority, she put her foot down. “What are you doing, are you trying to kill him?”

She facilitated my release back into the SOCR, and arranged a medicine dose schedule that allowed me to have a more normal life.

Clozaril was, and continues to be, a miracle. We got the illness under control. I  Jumped right into a part time job, and began taking college courses.

It was Hillary who was quoted saying, “it takes a village to raise a child”. Let me paraphrase, “it takes a state to heal a psych patient”.

      Katie; This sounds like Grandpa in so many ways – the kind of project he would absolutely see to completion. The treatment on these wards was so punishing, the inverse of restorative. How this ever would qualify as treatment is so dumbfounding. I hope things have improved, but have doubts. 

 

Here is an insight: Creating and maintaining an aura is a life’s work. One’s prayer could reflect in peace on earth. One’s sin could reflect in tragedy on earth. Just tending to a simple, and daily devotion could anonymously touch history’s course. If I bless, I bless the world. If I sin, use, I destroy the world. My destiny affects the world’s destiny.

Let me note here. Karen, the woman with whom I did the healing rite in the motel room, she got pregnant. I think the child was mine. The baby’s name was Juliet Sage. I think she looked like me. I broke it off with Karen. I was not mature enough for a sexual relationship. And Mom, Dad, my pastor, and my counselor Sharon all pressured me to terminate the relationship. She wanted to divorce her husband and marry me. But my times with her left me anxious and uneasy.

      Katie: That’s a lovely name.

Back in 1979 I was acutely schizophrenic. My parents moved to get me on public assistance, SSI. In order to do this I had to move out of their home. I found myself in gang territory, in a rooming house, on the west side. I was just out of the hospital, and in a much weakened state. And in stupidity continuing to use marijuana.

There was a gang of punks in that neighborhood that called themselves the mafia. Every time I got high they’d be there. What a tangled mess. I was an easy scapegoat. I got beaten bloody, baptized with paint, and robbed. Dad was done with me at this point, not knowing we still had a long, long way to go.

In my senior year of high school I wrestled in the 132 pound weight class. Honestly, I was not a great wrestler. We were well into the season, in a meet against a competitive school. A wrestling match is three two minute periods. My opponent was better than I. He put me on my back three times, once in each period. But I would not let my opponent pin me. Each time I used a bridge for most of the entire period. I would not let my opponent pin me. It was a close meet. I lost my match, but my team won the meet. I never gave up, we won by one point.

Let me enumerate three sins of our society. Three marks of our corrupt world system. The first is the use of double entendre. And that is saying things that have a second, sexual, meaning. The second mark is a predatory business mentality. This is the belief that good business is getting as much out of others as you can, and giving as little as possible in return. It is not based on win- win, or fair play. The third mark of our corrupt world system is our mental ranking system. This is the belief that the value of a human life is determined by social standing, educational level, wealth, and material possessions.  However in my reality ever life is precious.

      Katie: I worry a lot about this last one. I feel it is so intrinsically connected to our American identity. I hope this is cyclical and isn’t always going to be this way, but I don’t think it’s getting better right now. It gives me pause, as my job is representing the American ideal abroad.

Time to flashback again. Reverend Paul Kelly was the Catholic chaplain up at Saint Lawrence Psych. At the time of my incarceration he was on Board of Visitors. He visited me quite often. I looked forward to his visits, and we became friends. When I was on 007 he visited with a message. He shared the insight, “no matter how hard you pray, you cannot upend the will of God”. This thought begins an interesting discussion. I’m thinking that fervent devotion could change God’s will.

When one goes deep in prayer, we unite with God’s creating in timelessness. Our normal reality is then impacted.

I was transferred to B.P.C. from Saint Lawrence in early July 1987. Almost two years to the day from when I was committed. In shackles, I was transported in an O.M.H., Office of Mental Health van. We stopped at a thruway stop, so I could urinate. The parking lot was full of cars, and the concession building was full of people. I’ll always remember the looks from the crowd as I walked in irons with a guard on each side.

Though the judge who presided over the psych center at Saint Lawrence had just served me with a two year retention order, my stay at B.P.C. was short. It became clear to me that a simple three day observation order could grow into a life sentence. One retention order at a time.

After one year and nine months at Saint Lawrence, I petitioned O.M.H. in Albany for a transfer to Buffalo. On the grounds that my family lived in the Buffalo area. The transfer was granted. I was admitted to ward sixty-seven, in the Strozzi  building.

It was July 2^nd. The weather had been clear and hot. Ward sixty-seven was on the seventh floor, and there was no air conditioning. It was brutally hot. On the night of July 4^th we had a bird’s eye view of all the fireworks displays from across the city.

And here destiny played her hand, again. The presiding psychiatrist was an old friend of mine. He lived in the same apartment building as I when he and his wife were in med school. We had picnicked and partied together. I baby sat his children. He embraced me as a long lost brother, and saw to it that I was discharged without any delays. This all reminds me of the book  “Gulliver’s Travels”. In one town I was an enemy to society. In another town a beloved brother.

Anyway, Father Paul had family in Buffalo. And he’d visit from time to time. On one of his visits he called me, and we scheduled an outing.

I’d read somewhere about a magical rite done to assure longevity. One was to anoint himself with five perfumes on the top of a famous mountain.

I gathered up four perfumes. Father Paul  brought a perfumed shaving lotion. We went back to Blue Mount, near where I offered the dove years before. It was a beautiful summer day. We anointed ourselves and offered prayers.

Let’s go to summertime 1987, right after my quick release from B.P.C. A Catholic healer came to town. His name was Father Matthew Swisdor. A special service was scheduled at Mom’s church, Saint Pius the Tenth. Mom and I prayed hard that night. News of the new medicine, clozaril, came shortly thereafter.

There were a lot of people praying for me.  Mom and Dad. Dad prayed for me, even while denying the existence of God. Judy and Dana, Lenny and Sue, Sandra and Bob, my sisters and their husbands. It is by God’s mercy and grace that I sit here writing today. In one breath, my hands raised in praises to God. In the next breath, my fists raised against another challenge.

Mid –Hudson psych is the facility that houses the most violently insane. Ina psych hospital, an inmate is considered guilty until proven innocent. “Can you prove why we shouldn’t send you to Mid-Hudson?” As tough as 007 was, I’m sure Mid-Hudson is worse. This threat riveted my knees to the floor, before my Bible, for days and weeks and months.

I felt my incarceration was an unjust incarceration. That I was not given a fair opportunity to justify myself before a judge and jury. I was locked away with violent and dangerous people. I was forced to take powerful mind altering drugs. I was forced to become someone I did not know, someone who was not me.

Needless to say, I was an angry, and sometimes despondent man. When I closed my eyes in prayer, I could see skyscrapers tumbling. When the building in Oklahoma was destroyed, it was an event that had to be. It was the undeniable consequence of our nation’s sins.

I was very aware of Timothy McVeigh’s pending execution. I could understand his fulfilling the role of warrior prophet. On the day of his execution the sky clouded over. As I prayed for his soul, lightning arced across the sky. He asked for last rites. “No-one knows where his soul has gone”.

Early on in my illness, I often visualized myself crossing over into Canada, and then heading north into the cold until my supplies and strength ran out.  Then dying in the presence of God. Then I read the story of Christopher Johnson McCandless. He died, it seems, his death in the cold north for me. His tragic story ends as he attempts to return to those he loves. I survived, barely survived, because my family loved me. We were far from perfect, but with all the data in, and some time to reflect, we were, and are, a good family.

      Katie: I asked grandpa once if he believed in God. He immediately answered “there are no atheists in foxholes”. I was just a little kid and I doubt I knew what an atheist was, and had no idea what a foxhole is. But I remembered that odd phrase, and learned what it meant years later. 

Dad rigorously encouraged my piano studies. He promised me it would pay off one day. I started piano studies at age eleven. At sixty-three years old, I still practice religiously. I have learned a lot of complex material, but have found public performance to be a challenge.

I’m going to stick my neck out, and say something here about prayer in the spirit. I think prayer in tongues is a viable and important aspect of prayer in the spirit. However it is often awkward, and not understood. Don’t pray in tongues if it’s going to scare someone away.

Likewise, I think different visualizations are a viable form of prayer. One cannot force  a visualization, but only allow it to occur. The lotus and standing wave are always there. Practice allowing yourself to see them. A gentle invitation.  A  They will grow in power and beauty over time.

I lived on Helen Street, on the West Side of Buffalo, for twenty two years. From 1990 to 2012. It was initially an Italian and Irish settlement. But in the time I was there the neighborhood degraded, and the dealers and punks established themselves. The dealing was clearly evident, but the cops turned a blind eye.

I’d been running my gardening business out of my apartment and garage. I’d stowed all my garden tools in the garage, as I we needed the truck to do the Allentown art show. The Allentown show is a yearly outdoor art show. It draws hundreds of artists, and a crowd of 100,000 viewers. Patrick, a friend, and I booked curb space, and set out our wares. He’s a musician and was hawking his cd’s. I was selling my artwork, books and cards. We got rained on, but we made a few sales, nevertheless.

Anyway, when the show was over I went back to the apartment. It was time to load tools, and get back to work. I opened the large sliding door and gasped. It’d been hit hard. My tools were mostly gone, and I had customers waiting. I called the police.

I waited and waited for the police. I had to call four times. After four hours the police finally arrived. They assured me everything would be O.K., and that a detective would be getting back to me soon. I waited days for the detective to arrive, and then called the police desk again. They were rude and told me not to bother them. It was explained to me that the police have four day weekends, and to wait until Tuesday. Tuesday I called again. Then I was told it was time for summer vacationsfor the detectives, and that it would be weeks before they could get to me. I had important evidence for them, and needed them in a timely manner. I had hand prints where they pushed their way in. And blood spots on the garage floor from where one of the thieves had cut himself on a nail on the way in. After six weeks the detectives finally arrived. The detectives reprimanded me for being lax in regard to the evidence, and told me the evidence was no longer valid, as I waited too long.

Meanwhile, I did my own police work. I went to pawn shops, and garage sales hunting for my tools. A month after the robbery I heard the sound of a power hedge trimmer a few doors down. It sounded like one of my machines, and went to check it out. Sure enough, it was one of my hedge trimmers, a 500 dollar tool, with my mark on it. I engaged the young man using it in conversation. I told him I had a garden service, and needed workers, and asked for his name and number. Then I told him he was using a tool that had been stolen from me, and that a police report had been filed. Right there he choked, and coughed half of my stolen tools. Again I waited four hours for the police.

The young man gave a statement to the police. Victor, a dealer that lived across the street, had stolen and sold the tools. Again the detectives assured me they would get back to me soon. After another two weeks I called the detectives number again. Again I was told not to bother them, they had it all figured out.

So, I waited six weeks without hearing from them, and finally called again. The detective told me the charges had been dropped, and the case dismissed. “What”, I inquired, “how could this be?” I was instructed to call the D.A.’s office. There I was told they’d decided to reduce charges from grand larceny to petit larceny, and then to a misdemeanor. Those involved were subpoenaed, twice, and did not show up. Because they did not show up for subpoena, charges by law had to be dropped. This was the law of double jeopardy, I was told. Of course, this was all baloney.

As you can imagine, things were mighty uncomfortable on Helen Street. The man implicated, Victor, followed me into my back yard, threatening me for giving him angry looks.  Several houses on Helen Street had recently been torched. Victor’s father warned me that my house was next.

I went back inside. It was summertime.  I had the rear, upper, apartment. The windows were open. I could hear a girl crying out from behind the house on the property next door. I peered from my window down into the yard below. A young girl was pinned into a chair by a hooded punk. He was bending her thumbs back, and threatening to kill her. I called 911, assault in progress. The cops were there within three minutes. I was glad to see them.

It was time to make changes. I called Dad, and explained the situation. Over the next month, I put all my possessions in a storage unit. I set up a second cell for my remaining tools. I moved back home with Mom and Dad. I promised Dad 500 dollars a month for room and board. Plus help around the house. At this point Mom and Dad were beginning their end of life journey. It was good for them for me to be there. It was good timing.

Now, six years after the robbery, I see the thieves did me a favor. I’ve stepped off into a whole new world.

Dana, my brother in law, and I just had a long phone conversation. We were talking about the opiod epidemic and how easy it is to get hooked. The conversation led to a discussion of our own experiences with mind altering drugs. Something psychic truly does occur, but it is drug induced. Something supernatural does occur, but it is drug induced. Something mystical does occur, but it is drug induced.

It was hard for me to learn to create without drugs. It was hard for me to learn to pray without psychosis, but it can be, must be learned.

We are called to become Spirit warriors, and must learn to wage war. Let our war be won through prayer, and words, and deeds, and art. And may we follow in the steps of the nonviolent warriors who have walked before us. We learn to focus our will, and our minds. Physical warfare is the court of last resort. Do not heed the siren call. Mortal sin. Serious crime.

I went down to Billy’s camp in October, to ready the house for hunting season. Billy shared that he was giving up dealing, but he did not know how he was going to pay the bills. I took pity on him, and gave him 400 dollars for utility bills.

When I came back in from hunting the next day there were several cars parked outside the cabin. I walked in, and several tables were set up. The living room and kitchen had been set up as a pot cleaning operation. There were several people inside snipping away with scissors, and getting the pot ready to dry and pack.

It was November 2013, I was driving from the Lake house back to Mom and Dad. Dad was in hospice. It was at sunset and the sky was a beautiful red. I got to Dad’s room. The family had gathered. His time was near. I fell down to my knees at his bedside, and bathed his cheeks with my tears. “Michael”, he said, “don’t overdo it”. He died soon thereafter.

But not until both Sandra and Judy had a special time with him.  Sandy took the night watch that night. He woke Sandy up in the middle of the night to tell her that he was “at the pillars of creation”. Dad gave Sandra the end of a white hospital blanket, and instructed her. “I’m going to step off into the next world, but if I tell you, pull me back”. But he did not step off into the next world that night.

The next night Judy took the midnight watch. She helped him into the bathroom to wash and shave. When they were situated in front of the mirror, Judy asked him if he had a plan. “A plan for what”, he asked. “A plan for dying and being received”, Judy responded. There and then, Dad asked Jesus into his heart.

Dad was a good man, but he resisted the Lord’s call until his death bed. One close friend offered, “he was a Christian but didn’t know it”. Dad died two days later.

I was at Dad’s bedside when he died. As was Mom, and all the sisters. His heart just stopped beating, his breathing ceased. Momma told me to keep my hands on his arm and chest until his body cooled. TO BE LOVED UPON ONE’S DEATH BED.

This was all extremely hard on my older sister Sue. She’d been weakened by her own illness, and Dad’s death was a crushing blow. Over the past several years Sue has at times been critically ill. She is afflicted by lupus, which manifests in many different ways. She and I have at times contended. However, she is the one person whom I especially hold in prayer. In return, she guards my life. She is the one whom made this house possible. She’s the one who brought Andy to me. She is the one who is handling the estate and the trust. She has been there to comfort and guide when anxiety was more than I could bear.

When I was bedridden with broken ribs, a girl from church came over to help me with things. Her name is Jan. She’s been visiting often, and we’ve become friends. She’s helped with dishes, laundry, vacuuming and cleaning. Now she’ll visit, and we’ll share a meal. We’ve watched movies, done yoga, played uno. I’ve introduced her to yoga, and yogic breathing. It’s a long process.

She came over for dinner last night. She brought a Time Life magazine of history’s greatest one hundred people. Einstein, Mahatma Gandhi, Martin Luther King. Also mentioned was the writer James Joyce. There was mention of his classic, Ulysses. Ulysses has no plot, no dashing hero, no ending. It’s words often flow as stream of consciousness. Reading about this informed me, and it frees my mind. This writing, then, can take it own form. The precedent has been set long ago, by incontrovertible greats.

I crossed paths with a neighbor last fall. She began to speak in the spirit. She said that this neighborhood will take on a spirit like that of Lilydale. She also said that I would marry a neighbor named Dawn. However, her foretelling is not prophecy. What she predicts will not occur. She has no inkling of the anointing we are under. And for now that’s best.

I thought this episode of hypergraphia was about over. That the hydrocodone had worn off. But more is coming. It is weighty, and cumbersome, like prying stones the size of skulls from the earth with a shovel.

I was walking the perimeter of the Trinity Building up at Saint Lawrence State. It was a bed of skull size stones four feet wide, all around the building. As I walked on the stones a mouth appeared on one asking, “who is that?” Another stone answered, “its Michael”.

There is a scripture I love entitled Acts 19:11-12. Here is a retelling of a story about Saint Paul. He would bless handkerchiefs or aprons. They would be be sent to the sick and afflicted. And in that miracles would occur.

It looks as if the Richardson Olmstead Commission and the Historical Society in Buffalo will be taking my artwork, my portfolio. There are more than one hundred pieces. I’m going to bless some sack cloth, some burlap, with a prayer for healing and restoration. And affix a piece to the back of every piece of artwork. That wherever my work goes, miracles and restoration will follow.

I’ve been dialoging with the administrator of the R.O.C. Her name is Christine. The R.O.C. is the corporation overseeing the rebirth of the psych center into a commerce center. It has become a hotel, restaurant, office, and business space.

I shared a story with her, from when I was an inpatient. Mom would come and get me every Sunday morning, and take me home. Every Sunday night she would bring me back. I would go into my room, crack open the window, and sit on the floor to meditate. And every Sunday night, one single robin would sing through the night. I told Christine the robin’s song came from the building from which she was talking to me.  Rhema, the living word.

She asked for pictures of my work.  I sent some old photos, and samples of my books and cards. She called me last Monday. I have a body of work prepared. They are interested.

Supposedly, we live in a time of sexual freedom. Though I discern God desires chastity of us. That one must be chaste to receive the fullness of His blessing.

I see that schizophrenia, like nuclear power, can be harnessed. The power in my life is harnessed schizophrenia.

I just talked to another friend, Diane. She works at the Catholic Center.  I asked her to send me new rosaries, scapulars, and miraculous medals. When one carries a rosary in a pocket, and uses it often, it will break in a couple of months. Scapulars will break too.

The R.O.C. and the Historical Society are interested in this work for good reasons.  My family located in this area in the 1800’s. My dad, born in 1922 grew up on West Avenue, right near the hospital. I’ve been a patient of the hospital since youth, twenty years of age. And I’ve successfully taken part in a ground breaking scientific experiment. The introduction of the medication clozaril. We are bearing out the insight that schizophrenia can be harnessed, and channeled.

There were times when I was totally, inexcusably, out of line. I was about twenty two years old, and a friend of mine named Bruce took me to a party. It was all college kids. Normal drinking and smoking. As I was talking to another of the guests, I heard a voice speaking through the music that was being played on an old vinyl phonograph.  It said “hit him low, then hit him high.” So I punched him in the gut, and then in the face. Total inexcusable insanity.

Now down the road many years, I was hanging out with a rock band named Utopia Rising. I felt that God told me to befriend them to share his truth. We did shows in bars, and coffee houses, and house parties. They were heavy drinkers and hard drug users. When I first befriended them, the spirit spoke through of one of the girls saying “you will have no trouble here, unless you touch one of the women”. For ten years I hung out with them and never touched a woman, alcohol, or drugs of any type.

One of the girls that hung out with us helped me in the cleaning business. She helped me do the carpets at Saint Pius Church, and also with the selling. We became close. She invited me to a party at her house on a Saturday night. I was hoping to have an opportunity to be with her, to begin a relationship.

She was sitting on the floor, in front of me. I was in a chair. She was in my space, in my love. But then a young man showed up, and told me that Carrie was his date that night. I relinquished my claim, though he may simply been vocalizing my own thoughts. I still anguish over this. Carrie was perfect. She fit. I have most often been too shy around girls, and this has caused me a lifetime of pain.

Other girls showed up, and hung out with us. There were girls that wanted intimacy. But I always turned away. And now looking back on it, I don’t know how that happened.

Lance played guitar and did vocals for the band. He also composed. Even though he was in to the dark occult, we became close friends. He worked with me in the cleaning and gardening business for two or three years. We shared a love of mysticism, and the arts. I took him on retreat to the monastery, twice.

The first time I took Lance to the monastery we took picks, shovels, and a wheelbarrow. It was my intention to excavate a stone crypt I had found in the woods years before. My instincts told me it contained an archeological relic. The voices and forces told me the golden plates of The Book of Mormon were buried there.  We found the crypt, but decided not to dig, right then.  A year later we went back, but the site had been bulldozed. it was the summer of 1995. I went back there again, twice, with archeological experts, to no avail.

We spent several days with the monks. Lance was right in his element. He loved the chanting in the underground chamber, the black robes, and the candles. He repoired well with the brothers, and the brothers liked him. We hiked the hills, and prayed the prayers.

I took three of the the boys in the group up to the mountains. We stayed in the Huth camp on Kiwassa. The fishing was great, and I had time to share with the boys. However the burden of responsibility fell on my shoulders, and the chores were a heavy load.  However, Jon cleaned the catch, Lance tended the fire, and Justin handled the truck, boat, and trailer.

I’ve not seen much of the boys in recent years. Jon did help me set up the wood burner here at the lake house.  Justin and I had a falling out about five deer seasons ago. He felt that I’d been selfish and unfair with access to a certain hunting property. He may have been right.

I do know, however, that sometimes brothers fight. And sometime brothers have to forgive.

Mom had a childhood friend, down in Portageville. Her name was Mary Olton. I would see her on Sundays at the little Catholic Church. There we’d always exchange greetings. For this reason she gave me special permission to hunt her land. And I jealously guarded that permission. It was a crop field surrounded by wooded park land. The crop was usually corn or alfalfa, it was full of deer. I was introduced to hunting at age forty. I discovered something I love to do.

Meanwhile, contentions with my father continued. He wanted an admiral, a senator, or a surgeon. But I chose a monastic path, a simple life of work and prayer. For many years my life was to work through the day, pray through the evenings, and keep centered on the Lord.

I’ve attempted a relationship with a woman a few times. But it doesn’t work out for me. Monastic inclinations pull me in one direction, while a woman pulls in another. Late nights and long days of prayer and study do not peacefully cohabitate with a woman’s needs.

The day I became an oblate was the most understated day of my life. It was a simple ceremony. We met on a Friday afternoon with a Catholic priest at a church way downtown. Mom and Dad came to share the moment. It was a short service, with simple vows. We went out for lunch afterwards. How greatly becoming an oblate has impacted my life goes beyond the telling.

For some, becoming an oblate amounts to very little. For me, it has been a solid rock in a sturdy foundation. I have emulated the monastic lifestyle.

I may have become a monk as a reaction to the abuse of a pedophile when I was fifteen years old. Pedophilicism is a serious sin, and a serious crime, and should be treated as such.

On second amendment rights. We need to be able to protect our homes. In the event of disaster, we need to be able to protect our homes against roving bands. We also need to be ready to defend ourselves against an over powerful and over privileged police force. The reason some gun owners feel a need to keep automatic weapons is to be prepared, and ready to enter combat.

I have limited emergency stores here. Wood, candles, kerosene, blankets, food and water. However a nuclear conflict would render most everyone to desperate circumstances. The huge hydro generators at Niagara Falls are only forty miles away. We would feel the flash of a fusion bomb.

I cannot overemphasize the importance of prayer for enduring world peace. This should be kept at the heart of every Christian’s life.

I’m planning to put in vegetable gardens this year, and will need to outsource soil and fencing. I’d like to do Swiss chard, beans, squash, beets, lettuce, cabbage, and peppers. I’d like to put in marijuana as well.

But the big acquisition this year is to be a fully appointed fishing vessel. Modest, yet worthy of the inland waters.

Falling, and breaking ribs last December was a reset button for me.

I called the Catholic Church to ask if the sacraments could be brought to me. The Eucharistic minister visited here several times over the first five weeks after the accident. Now I’m going to morning mass with him twice a week.

Jan is a woman in the praise group, choir, at church with me. When I was too sick to fend for myself she visited here to help out. Now I have a new friend.

When I was on hydrocodone I promised my sister Judy that I would do a cleanse when I recovered. I  just completed a ten day cleanse. It reminded me of all the principles of healthy eating. Fresh fruits and vegetables, whole grains, clean protein in the form of eggs and fish. The program called for small fish like sardines. Or clean fish like wild caught salmon. And nutritious oil, like olive oil. It was moderately difficult.

Today was a busy day. A case of wine arrived, on a National Geographic promotion. The plan is that they’ll deliver twelve bottles of wine every twelve weeks.  And I am not a drinker.

Spectrum cable service delivered a new modem to me. I dropped the TV part of my subscription. Their rates have gone up.  It took an hour on the phone with a tech to hook up the new unit. The tech support is based in the Philippines. The tech’s accent was so thick I could hardly understand her.

And, I received an order of preparedness supplies. Food rations, water filters, back up batteries for the cell phones.

Andy was getting stinky, so last night I gave him a bath. But today when I opened the door for the wine delivery, he got out. He ran for a couple of hours and came back muddy. He got by me on his way back in, and ran through the house. He jumped up on the freshly washed bed spread with his dirty body. He’s in his crate now, where he’ll spend the night. I’ll bathe him again tomorrow.

July 8^th, 2018

Kate, this is as far as the hydrocodone brought me. The Lake House is a star ship, and we’re traveling through the universe at the speed of thought.  We’re working through challenges, and continue to make progress.

We’ve erected three out buildings. A cottage, a wood shed, and a smoker. Now the project is calling for an electrician and a plumber.

Today is Sunday July 8^th. 2:40 pm. The weather is perfect. The neighborhood is quiet, and I’ll have time for prayer.

Remember that keeping one’s soul clean is the work of God. Much is accomplished in the material reality by one clean soul going forward through time. Like a miner with a lamp going through a dark cave. The power of simple light is inestimable.

When I escaped to the Adirondacks,

the voices said that I should bring down fire from heaven.

To this end I gathered wood, and kindling, and tinder.

Then I took a magnifying glass and a book of matches.

I focused sunlight and ignited the matches.

The matches ignited the tinder, the kindling,

and then the larger branches.

Fire from heaven,

its smoke picked up by the wind

and carried round the world.